What the army is doing is cleaning those areas, and the indication that the army is strong is that it's making advancement in that area. It never went to one area and couldn't enter to it - that's an indication. How could that army do that if it's a family army or a sect army ? What about the rest of the country who support the government ? It's not realistic, it doesn't happen. Otherwise, the whole country will collapse.

For the West, they wanted to undermine the Syrian positions. For the petrodollar countries like Saudi Arabia, they're thinking undermining Syria will undermine Iran on sectarian basis.

As a state, as a government, in 2001 we proposed to the United Nations to empty or to get rid of every WMD in the Middle East, and the United States stood against that proposal. This is our conviction and policy.

If you want to talk about mistakes, every country has mistakes, every government has mistakes, every person has mistakes. When you have a war, you have more mistakes. That's the natural thing.

Regarding fighting terrorism, we are ready to cooperate with anyone in this world with no conditions. That's crux of our policy, not today, not yesterday; for years, even before the war on Syria, we always said that.

We can say, you can win the war only when you restore stability in Syria.

There's a video on YouTube where the terrorists clearly make trials [of chemical weapons] on a rabbit and kill the rabbit and said "this is how we're going to kill the Syrian people."